Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

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> as long as there is sunlight and tons of water, they should be fine.

That's completely ridiculous. Plants don't fit your magical conception of them. Talk to any farmer or someone with a degree in forestry. Every species has its preferred temperate zones, moisture, and sunlight requirements. Heck, a gardner will tell you that. Plants need to be pollinated. The pollinators die, the plants die. Plants don't break down dead plants. Fungus, insects, and herbivores do. Those parts of the ecosystem die, plants die too. Throw in invasive species, pests like bark beetles that won't die in winter, and you can absolutely expect forests to collapse. Everything is connected. It's a system with millions of parts. It's already showing signs of abuse. Collapse is starting. Forests are weakening, tree lines are changing, some whole regions are showing signs they may die off. I've seen it with my own eyes in SW Utah. Biologists see climate change happening everywhere. We're looking at vast loss of biodiversity and collapse of ecosystems as things speed up.

It's ridiculous to think that whole ecosystems will just collapse instead of adapt with the species that are good generalists and can manage a warmer climate and the ongoing impact of humans. Plenty of wildlife manages to live inside cities, including various plants, fungi, insects, birds and mammals. Will it be pristine and as diverse before? No, but it will be what survives, as has always been the case on Earth since life evolved. Some parts of forests and ecosystems will die and other parts will take their place, and some will do even better because it's warmer with more CO2. Not always what we'd like, but nature will be there in one form or another.

The current diversity of the world evolved form times of less diversity which came from times of greater diversity and so on for several major and minor extinctions over the past couple billion years, and plenty of upheaval on more local and regional scales. Nature is always changing and adapting. There are always species migrating around and adapting or going extinct.

All of the trees I’ve seen where I live have been damaged either by the current drought or by various bark beetle attacks. All of them. We had to cut down a birch tree that was girdled by bark beetles, and I’m very worried about the mature red cedars on our property surviving the next ten years. You can drive around the city here and count dead or dying trees. Tell me how are they supposed to adapt?

Maybe they won't? Maybe you will have to plant trees that can live there. The article mentions that while the Amazon could become barren by 2500, the American midwest may be tropical. Guess what kinds of plants would grow there? And crops would grow closer to the poles. So Canada and Russia would grow much of the world's food.

That's not ideal, but I'm guessing that 480 years is enough time for humans to adapt. Anyway, there have been several articles on here saying that global plant growth and the number of trees have increased over the past century based on NASA's satellite imagery and counts from 50,000 locations. So while your area may be losing trees, other areas are gaining them. Nature adapts and changes.

That isn’t a plan, it’s an appeal to “life finds a way.”

Exactly! I’m totally confident that life will find a way and Earth will be fine (no matter how badly we hurt the environment)… Not so confident however that the life that finds a way will include humans.

I don't see many people arguing that climate change will end life on Earth or something. But a mass extinction could mean, for example, that everything in the ocean larger than your hand dies. It could mean, for example, that lush forests full of a myriad of insects, birds, mammals, turn into wastelands. It could mean the extinction of huge swaths of animals, like goodbye raccoons, bears, squirrels, bison, wolves, deer. Or goodbye lizards, turtles, snails, snakes. Maybe it hits a link lower in the chain first, like bees, ants, and whole towers of the ecosystem collapse down from there.

When the dinosaurs were obliterated by the Chicxulub impactor 65 million years ago, 90% of land species also disappeared, never to reappear again. It took millions of years for mammals to emerge as the "victors" of that huge extinction event.

The viewpoint you espouse is just so hollow and frankly, repugnant. The thought that we can just stupidly smash incredibly intricate towers of evolution's genius, flub our precious time on this Earth to move from ignorantly and unintentionally knocking them over to actively raising a sledge hammer to them, justifying it to ourselves that "it will all be fine". Such a destructive attitude ruins everything for everyone. It's flippant and stupid, But it's ultimately, tragically, self-destructive.

It doesn't matter what we think. It's our actions.

I think we agree — I quit eating meat entirely a couple of years ago because I feel so strongly about the environmental concerns.

Sorry if it didn’t come through in my comment: I was just being a little sarcastic and building off the GP comment, trying to reiterate that “life finds a way” is pointless to try and argue, since human life is much more fragile than life in general (and I tend to value human life).

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